Mac vs. PC: Showdown For Reals!!!

We ended up putting the eternal Mac vs. PC question to the test by buying one of each.

It sounds extravagant, I realize.  And believe me, I went through a lot of time consuming, painful self-justification before I pulled it off.  It's an indulgence we won't see the likes of again for nigh on seven years. 

What pushed my over the edge was hooking my seven year old Windows Millennium laptop up to our new broadband connection.  It worked so well that I decided to update the anti-virus software to keep things running well.  After I did this, my Windows registry got trashed so bad the computer wouldn't run anything installed after 2001.  And it wouldn't run Internet Explorer.  Or Windows Explorer.  I couldn't open "My Computer"!  Anti-virus software gave my PC Alzheimer's! 

I could still surf the web with Firefox, bless their open-sourcey souls, but that was all the computer could do.  There was nothing for it but a clean re-installation of the OS.  Unfortunately I lost the system recovery disks years ago.

So The Wife says,  "Why don't you just buy the Apple and stop talking about it."  And she googled an Apple store in Cambridge, right across the Charles, and about 100 feet from where I go jogging.  (Regular readers could ask me why I drove to the CompUSA store last time, and I would not have an answer.)

Last time I tried to buy an Apple, the salesfolk at CompUSA sold me so hard on the AppleCare service plan that I left in disgust, convinced the computer would explode if I pressed two keys at the same time, that the screen was engineered to shatter the day after the standard warrantee expired, and that the hard drive was made of cheese and ill wishes.  A few friendly Apple folks stopped by the blog and calmed me down by explaining that CompUSA was full of jerks and liars. 

Apple doesn't make you sign up for the warrantee at the point of sale - they give you a whole year to do it. 

So this time, at the real Apple store, I stand next to the computer I want until a salesgirl looks at me, and I say, "I want this one right here please and I absolutely don't want the AppleCare and just put the computer in a box and I will pay for it and leave!" 

And she says, "Okaaaaay, can I ask why?"  So I got to parade the whole story out, which left me feeling satisfied but a little foolish.  Kind of took the wind out of my sails, if you know what I mean.  I was more comfortable with the resentment festering inside of me.

But this girl, she's got the "our computers are cute and so am I" marketing ploy down to twenty decimal places, the whole pale-faced sweet-voiced geek-girl role, and I'm letting her talk to me for twenty minutes about dashboard widgets and the free printer rebate and the fact that AppleCare really is a good deal if I want to sign up for it sometime over the the next year, though of course it's nothing to her, really.  And I don't mind, she's so cute, and I want to ask her if every MIT professor and Harvard undergrad who comes in here hits on her, and how she feels about married guys who never went to college (just out of academic curiosity) but with The Wife standing right there, there are about three dozen ways that could get awkward.  So I just count out my cash while the cute salesgirl, she thinks crazy person, bad credit, luddite nutter with a fear of progress, no respect for a good extended warrantee, but she can't count cash.  She tells me that I only gave her $1220 and I tell her that's impossible, there's a fifty in there and no tens whatsoever so the total can't be a multiple of twenty and I decide I don't care how cute Cambridge girls are Larry Summers was right even geek girls can't do math. 

In the end it all works out, and I'm a little sad with myself for letting style triumph over substance.

Except then I get home and start playing with the thing, and it's easy!  Installing software is just a matter of dragging a downloaded file into the applications folder.  I figure certainly I'm doing something wrong.  Bit it works!  I pass up the one month trial of Microsoft Office for OpenOffice, which is free.  It requires that I install the X11 open source programming environment, but the instructions to do this are clear and uncomplicated.  (Apple even put a copy of the X11 file on their install disk just for the few open-source radicals like me who wanted it.)  X11 runs The Gimp, too, a free-alternative to Photoshop.  Neat.  I've just saved $600 on software, I haven't even had to download anything illegally, and installation was just a click and drag. 

There's not a bunch of free offers and promotions popping up and cluttering the desktop. 

It takes me about ten minutes to get used to control-clicking instead of right-clicking, but then I plug in my old mouse and go back to right-clicking anyway. 

And then I start web-surfing and writing, which is what I bought the thing for.

I'm so satisfied with the damn thing that I'm uncomfortable.  Could it be that all those Mac users, droning on and on about how much they love their Macs, giving Apple all this weird loyalty and free publicity, actually have a point?  Maybe they're not just zombies with parasitized brains chanting, "one of us, one of us..."  Or maybe I'm one now, too.

Well, now it's a couple weeks in and I'm convinced they're not.  This thing just works.

On to the PC. 

We wanted a PC to use with a projector we bought in lieu of a television.  We're happy with the projector.  It gives us an eight foot screen that takes advantage of our tiny apartment's high ceilings, but it doesn't take up a ton of room.  It has all kinds of inputs, including DVI.  Occasionally we'd plug the laptop into it and watch Youtube up on the big wall.  But running the second display off the laptop tends to overheat it.  So we'd been thinking for a while how nice it would be to have a dedicated computer for it.  Web browsing on the thing is pretty awesome, and maybe we'd try some of those video games which had been passing our aging computers by.

We figured, Dell, they have some pretty good deals, so we ordered one.  And the fun began:

• Shipping.  The Wife spent a whole day at home, waiting for UPS.  At 5 PM she called to track the package.  It turns out the driver came by at 2 PM.  He couldn't figure out which buzzer to press and so left with out pressing any.  So we left a note that said, "press the buzzer with our apartment number on it," but it took another day of waiting, trapped inside the apartment, afraid even to shower and miss the call, to get the thing.
• Drives.  We ordered a DVD burner.  It came with a DVD ROM (which is broken) and a CD burner.
• Operating System.  Windows Vista.  Brand new OS.  I'm expecting: shiny and user friendly - a bit more like the Mac, maybe?  With less crashing and better security than ol' Win XP?  No, it's the same darn thing as Windows XP was, but with some different colors and a little thing in the corner that tells you what the weather is.  And it won't run our old software, or any of the games we wanted to try.  The cutting-edge graphics accelerator card it comes with, yeah, the Vista drivers aren't ready for it yet.  And every time we try to install a program we get warnings from two different applications that the program could be dangerous.  And then we get more warnings that our anti-virus isn't installed.  I can not believe they're shipping this mess and calling it a product.
• Tech Support.  We spent hours with these people, getting transferred from one department to the next.  It took a week of phone and email exchanges to get the DVD burner we ordered originally, and now I have to install it myself.
• Return Policy.  We were so fed up by the third day that we tried to get a return authorization for it.  But we'd have to pay a 15% restocking fee, plus shipping, plus what they paid to ship it to us in the first place.  Plus it takes them up to 30 days to apply the credit.

In the end I had to call Aaron.  He's my best friend and an absolute wizard with this computer shit.  Fucking amazing.  He opens and closes windows before anyone reads them, even him.  Seriously, I'd rather watch him work on computers than watch ballerinas swallowing swords on pointe.  Last year he bought a Windows Developer kit with ten licenses for Windows XP and Microsoft Office.  He still had a few left.  So I drove to Plymouth, picked him up, bought him dinner, and paid him the kind of short money you can only pay someone to fix your computer if they're your best friend. 

Even with his mad skills, it took him ten hours to downgrade this new Dell to run Windows XP.  He had to download and install all the drivers, flash my router, fondle my dongle, and re-install all those applications and games.   

Now it runs great.  About ten times faster running XP than it ran Windows Vista. 

Isn't it weird how, as Windows computers get faster and faster, Microsoft just dumps bigger and bigger operating systems on them to slow them down again?  It's like they want computer users to be perpetually unhappy!

So the end result: both computers are working great and we're happy with both of them, now.  We bought a lot of shiny new technology that should last us for the next six to seven years.  The Windows machine is better for gaming and 3D graphics, and we wouldn't have gotten that kind of raw performance from Apple, not at twice the price.  But Dell is right out, flat-out, never again, the worst experience ever.  PCs work great if your best friend is a magician and you have lots of extra time.  And if you don't get the latest operating system.  And if you install manually from a basic OS disk and then install your drivers one at a time in your device manager, and if you don't upset or tilt or cajole the registry.  That may be a lot to remember, but The Wife has been playing The Sims and World of Warcraft ever since we worked out the kinks, and this leaves me with a lot of time to myself.

Which I spend pounding away on my new Mac, which just works.

Comments

[Rebecca]

You give me some hope that someday I can upgrade to XP. Of course it was just a few years ago I upgraded to 2000. I will never touch Vista... I have an iBook I love too much.

The mac thing, they are totally intuitive, extremely low learning curve. That's why they just work. No geeky friends required. And that should be in the commercials.

[Chili]

You need this:

http://steampunkworkshop.com/keyboard.shtml

[loop garou]

probably would have been cheaper if you paid him in heroin!